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Times Watch for May 4, 2004

“Star Wars” Graduates from
“Misbegotten…National Fixation”

     James Glanz began the missile-defense update by insisting: “Although the system is not a secret, it has been revived with so little fanfare that few Americans seem to realize it exists.” That might be because the press in not exactly a hotbed of interest in new weapons systems, unless there’s a $600 toilet seat involved.

     Even as the new system comes into being, Glanz found “it is inspiring the same sort of passion that arose during the national fixation with Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars effort, officially the Strategic Defense Initiative. Unlike Star Wars, which faded into the realm of misbegotten high-tech dreams, the new system relies on agile but fairly ordinary rockets to smash incoming warheads rather than nuclear-powered lasers in space.” But the 1980s debate was not between lasers and rockets, but between Reagan’s vision of a missile-defense system and arms-control-adoring liberals who didn’t want any escalation of weapons in the “high frontier” of space, even if America was left defenseless in a hostile missile attack.

     Glanz featured Lt. Gen Ronald Kadish, the man in charge of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, as well as critics like Richard Garwin (“It’s totally useless”) and Philip Coyle of the liberal Center for Defense Information. While Kadish isn’t described as a conservative ideologue, Glanz doesn’t describe either Garwin (who’s been affiliated with the anti-SDI Federation of American Scientists) or Coyle as liberals.

For the complete Glanz article, click here.

• James Glanz | Missile Defense

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org